How Long the Hobble Skirt?
In the 1910s, the hobble skirt was blamed for traffic accidents, bankruptcies, and setting back the women's rights movement
In April 1913, the New York Tribune reported on a contentious trial taking place in Jersey City. The paper described the defendant’s friends as “chiefly fair, furious, and feminine.” Waiting for the verdict, supporters “feared for the worst.” The defendant in the case was not an accused thief or an alleged murderer but a women’s garment, the hobble skirt.
By 1913, the hobble skirt had been mocked and maligned from coast to coast. The ultra-tight skirt, which cinched in at the knees and ankles, created what Vogue called “a funny, ungraceful hobble” in wearers. In 1911, just a year into the hobble skirt’s reign, Town & Country declared the trend “definitely shelved,” and the St. Louis Post Dispatch published an obituary for the skirt, burying it beside the hoop skirt and the sheath gown, recording no mourners at the funeral. Both farewells were premature, more expressions of people’s hatred for the style than accurate descriptions of its demise. In an article titled “How Long the Hobble Skirt?” a writer in Life in the same year took issue with the skirt’s proportions: “A wisp of cloth, stretched over the hips and dropping scant and straight to the ankles! That a skirt? Those lines beautiful? Bless you, no.”
The Vogue writer observed a hobble-skirted American woman taking tiny, tiptoe steps across a restaurant and concluded that “it was plainly manifest it would be impossible to walk.” In their time, hobble skirts were deemed ridiculous, frivolous, and dangerous; the skirt was blamed for accidents, textile factory closures (the streamlined trend cut back demand for fabric), bankruptcies, drownings, and for setting back the movement for women’s rights. The New York Times weighed in when the trend was still picking up speed in the summer of 1910: “Possibly the most absurd place in which this skirt is seen is on a woman who is trying to cross Fifth Avenue between the two streams of traffic.” “Locomotion Is Seriously Impeded,” blared the headline, one of many that pointed out that women trying to navigate city life in a hobble skirt were at a hazardous disadvantage. Women in these skirts tripped and slipped and stumbled; they couldn’t take normal steps, let alone stride with purpose. But if it was hard to walk in a hobble skirt, athletic feats were required to board a trolley car while wearing one; the cars’ steps at the time could be as much as 19 inches off the ground. “Not only have there been a number of accidents,” the Tribune reported, “it is said the sight of a woman in a hobble skirt in the act of boarding a car will often make even a ballet dancer feel prudish.” This was the question before the New Jersey Public Utilities Commission: were the steps too high or the skirts too tight?
The call to lower car steps in New Jersey wasn’t unique; both New York and Washington D.C. had introduced “hobble skirt cars” of their own in order to make it easier for women to get on and off the platform after a similar outcry. In 1913, “a statewide controversy” erupted over the skirt in New Jersey, led by the women of Jersey City. The Buffalo Sunday Morning News summed up the position of the Public Service Railway this way: “You know that you could get on the cars easily if you wore reasonable clothes, but you will wear those awful hobbles and then you blame us.” The women said it wasn’t about hobble skirts at all: “No one but a bean pole could get on your old cars with any comfort no matter how wide her skirts were.” Short women, regardless of their skirt width, had trouble with the car steps too. The Railway company sent photographers to take pictures of women getting on and off the cars, looking for examples of any making their way just fine. The women carried a soapbox in front of the commission to demonstrate “how difficult it is for an aged woman or a young one with hobble skirts to clamber up to the tall step.” New York was held up as an ideal; there, they’d had the sense to regulate the cars to “suit the women,” rather than forcing women to “look like the backwoods.”
The hobble skirt was designed by a French man, Paul Poiret, who later said that in introducing lighter corsets and hobble skirts, he had “freed the bust” but “shackled the legs.” A woman quoted in the Washington Post in 1911 spoke about the ways that hobble skirts were not necessarily chosen by the women who wore them: “The men make them for us, and apparently admire women who wear them… the fashion has been set, and it is almost impossible to get your dressmaker to make any other kind of gown.” Suffragists organizing to win the vote for women banned hobble skirts, high heels, and gossip from their marches. Editorials pointed to hobble skirts as evidence that women were unfit for suffrage, due to a “lack of logic”: “If women want to run for governor, they ought to be able to run for a car,” one read. “If they want to step into a president’s chair they ought to be able to step into a motor. If they want to be legally free they shouldn't be sartorially shackled.”
Despite the jeers and the cartoons and the moral panic, many women loved their hobble skirts; it’s why they fought for improved street cars rather than give up on the trend. College students interviewed at Northwestern University in 1910 (who were violating a school dress code that outlawed the skirts) defended their right to “mince their way about the campus.” “It is my own business what I wear…I expect to wear my hobble skirt whenever I feel like it,” said one. “The men have no room to criticize them, for they are not half so ugly as the peg-top, cuffed trousers,” said another. Dr. Mary Walker, the pioneering advocate for “the adoption of men’s clothes for women” thought that hobble skirts were “a step in the right direction.” “She believes it is a long step toward sanity in feminine dress and takes it as a sort of vindication of her own course,” the Boston Daily Globe reported in 1912. Walker thought the hobble skirt heralded progress toward the day when women would abandon skirts altogether in favor of sensible trousers.
In October 1913, the State Board of Public Utilities Commissioners in New Jersey ordered the Public Service Railway Company to “place no more new cars in service with an initial step exceeding 15 inches in height.” The women had won. But the battle over what it meant to wear a hobble skirt raged on. The hobble skirt represented the modernity of the 20th century and a new independence. It empowered women to organize to change public transportation to better suit their needs. But it was also restrictive—in some cases literally—and a ready symbol for anti-suffrage activists, who saw the skirt as the embodiment of the illogical behavior of women. Was the skirt a sign of women’s agency to choose their own wardrobe (a wardrobe that was increasingly worn for work outside the home) or was a tight skirt proof of women’s subservience to the whims of men, a ridiculous insistence on following the latest fashion, no matter how impractical?
It’s a conundrum I’ve thought about a lot over the past year, while reading about and hearing from women determined to leave their underwire bras, heeled shoes, and skinny jeans behind in the post-pandemic world. Life in 2021 is hard enough without forcing yourself to wear hard pants, the thinking goes, and after more than a year swaddled in loose sweats and slouchy joggers, a person starts to wonder: why did we ever want to squeeze into uncomfortable clothes in the first place? We know the miracle of elastic waistbands and infinitely stretchy fabrics. Why subject our bodies to the unforgiving teeth of a zipper? At one time, the ability to wear “hard pants” in public was a hard-won privilege; women were once arrested for wearing trousers. Today even denim feels like a clingy cage.
I am one of the few people I know who worked from home all year and kept wearing jeans the entire time. I missed the person I was before, a person who liked dressing up, who smacked red lipstick on in the morning and stomped around the city in heeled boots and a green faux fur coat, a person who found joy in sequins and bright nails and perfume. In 2020, I was looking for any scrap of routine, any tenuous link to that past version of myself, and I think that’s why I kept swiping on mascara and pinning hoops in my ears and yes, wearing tight jeans, a performance of “stylish” womanhood I acted out on my living room couch. I can understand why my pandemic-self needed my chosen feminine trappings, but understanding why my past self needed them presents a thornier problem, though maybe the answer is simpler than it seems. Like the co-eds “mincing” around campus in their cherished hobble skirts, I liked how I felt in those clothes. I felt like myself.